http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009904150333
This article is about a city man in Rochester who was found shot and killed on Monday. Christopher Majors, 20 years old was found lying on the sidewalk near a church in the city of Rochester with one gunshot wound to his upper body. On February 2nd we learned about Gilliam and Iyengar’s pattern of scripting and news scripting; they define these scripts as a coherent sequence of events expected by the individual which provide an orderly, predictable set of scenarios. In regards to news scripting the author of the article sets this up perfectly: first they announce that a crime has occurred in the beginning of the article when they say that around 11 p.m. on Monday police officers responded to a report of a person being shot, next they transport to the scene of the crime where they discuss the victim’s whereabouts and his conditions saying that he was shot once in the upper body, and they then identify any possible suspects, which they have not found yet and discuss the related efforts of law enforcements to find these possible suspects. In class notes on March 4th while learning about the general victim characteristics, this article adds to these patterns; men account for 85% of victims, mainly in violent crimes (except for rape) like in this instance, and in half of the cases victims are under the age of 25, this victim being both a male and 20 years old. On that same day we learned about the role weapons play in crime, learning that weapons are used in 21% of all violent crime, that strangers are more likely to use them than non strangers, and that one third of weapons are firearms-mostly handguns. In Mr. Majors case all three of these statistics confirm and agree with these patterns. On March 16th we learned about how traditional definitions of homicide can be difficult to define while traditional definitions say that 1st degree is with malice, intentional, and premeditated while 2nd degree is with malice but not intentional or premeditated. It gets tricky when states such as New York have their own definitions, for example their 1st degree is defined as murder involving special circumstances, while 2nd degree is seen as with malice, intentional and premeditated. Class notes on March 18th discuss that 77& of homicide victims are males like that of this case. We also learned that 14% of all victims are killed by a stranger while 11% are killed by an intimate, although we do not know of any possible suspects of this particular case police could use this data to help investigate possible offenders.